A method of this kind is known from ALVAREZ, R. B.; MACOVSKI, A.; “Energy selective reconstruction in X-ray computerized tomography”, Phys, Med. Biol., vol. 21, pages 733-744, (1976). The known method is a computed tomography (CT) method in which projected images captured in different energy fields are used to create volume images of the three-dimensional density distribution of two different material components of an object to be examined. Volume images are in this case taken to mean three-dimensional images of the density distribution of different material components.
WARP, R. J.; DOBBINS, J. T.: “Quantitive evaluation of noise reduction strategies in dual-energy imaging”, Med. Phys. 30 (2), February 2003 describes details of what is known as dual-energy projection imaging. In dual-energy projection imaging two projected images of the object to be examined are captured using two different X-ray spectra. By appropriate combination of the two projected images it is possible to separate radiologically different materials, for example soft tissue and bone. In particular it is basically possible to create mass occupancy images in which the mass occupancy of one material component respectively is displayed. For example purely bone images or soft tissue images can be created. Mass occupancy images are taken to mean two-dimensional images of the mass occupancy surface density in particular.
However, there are often more than two different materials in the beam path, for example soft tissue, calciferous tissue or bone or tissue filled with iodine as the contrast medium. Dual-energy projection imaging, in which just two different spectra are used, provides only two equations for two unknowns however. If two materials are to be separated therefore, the third material is incorrectly displayed as a combination of the other two. For this reason dual-energy projection imaging does not generally provide quantitively correct results in the case of more than two different materials.
The same applies to multi-spectral computed tomography in which material-selective volume images are created using multi-spectral projected images captured from different directions of projection.